Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.

"Much of Mr. Adelson's casino profits that go to him come from his casino in Macau, which says that obviously, maybe in a roundabout way foreign money is coming into an American political campaign," McCain said in an interview on PBS's News Hour.

"That is a great deal of money, and we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization... that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and corporations are not people," he said.

Adelson has said he may pump up to 100 million dollars into the Romney campaign. Now if Romney is elected he's going to want something for that money and since Adelson is a real Israel first guy we can make an educated guess as to what that will be - more and bigger Middle East wars. That would be just fine with Romney's neo-con foreign policy advisors.

McCain also took on Citizens United and the SCOTUS.

McCain's comments came in the context of a rant against the unfettered private donations that are now flowing into the political arena due to the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the case Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the doors to unlimited political spending by corporations and invalidated parts of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law.

McCain called the decision "the most misguided, na�, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 21st Century," and money would be playing a dominant role in American politics for the foreseeable future.

"There will be scandals, there's just too much money washing around Washington today... I'm afraid we're for a very bleak period in American politics," he said. "To somehow view money as not having a corrupting effect on elections flies in the face of reality."